Silk Road 2.0 Admin: 13.2% Of the Stolen Bitcoins Fully Repaid

It was only one month ago when the Silk Road was hacked (or scammed, whatever version you prefer) and all bitcoins were stolen, few days later, Defcon, the site admin made a statement that all the stolen funds will be repaid by transferring the sites commission to the customers and vendors that had their money stolen during the hack (or whatever else it was). Last week we started getting some reports about people having “pending balance” in their accounts for the same amounts of money that they have lost during the hack, and some of them had the “pending balance” turned into a real balance – covering some or all of their losses.

Yesterday, Defcon the site admin posted a new updated (Original url: http://silkroad5v7dywlc.onion/index.php?topic=31724.0) and released some statistics about the repayment process, with interesting data, this is the original posted quoted, the data is marked in red:

==Start Quote==

Staff is excited to announce very positive news regarding the anticipated pace of repayment.

On behalf of all users who lost funds in the attack: Thank you, recent buyers. Thank you, active vendors.

Your purchases and sales are allowing us to repay at a way faster pace than we anticipated.

When we committed to repaying every single person affected by the attacks, we expected this process to take a very long time.

We are thrilled to announce that sales over the past seven days are already up to 61% of the volume we were seeing before the attacks.

If sales continue at the current pace, all victims of February’s hack will be completely repaid 93 days from this post.

Repayment Update as of 2014-03-12:Partially repaid: 30.8% of total victims Fully repaid: 13.2% of total victims Sales volume: 61% of pre-attack weekly sales Average commission: 5% (3% lower than before attack) Estimated date all users are repaid if sales continue at this week’s pace: June 13th, 2014

Important Reminders
1. This estimated repayment date is not a promise. We are repaying everyone as soon as we get the funds. If sales increase, everyone will get paid sooner. The rate of repayment is directly tied to the pace of sales, and the commission earned on each sale. We will be adding the ability for vendors to donate a higher commission soon, which hopefully will improve the pace further if many vendors adopt it.
2. We cannot release exact user counts, exact BTC owed, or sales figures for security reasons.
3. All escrow balances are currently being manually reviewed and resolved by staff. This is very tedious, and will take time. Our goal is to have all disputes settled within this 90 day time frame. We also plan to launch automated tools for this. Your escrow balances are safe.
4. The full amount owed to users is not the full amount lost to the attack. A large amount of funds stolen were our marketplace’s commission earnings. We will not release any exact amounts in order to help protect everyone’s anonymity from analysis.
5. We are continuing to improve the repayment algorithm to spread commissions in a fair and minimally-traceable fashion. If you have not received a payment yet, this does not indicate that you never will.

May our actions speak louder than our words. We are committed to repaying every victim.

Regarding Known Issues
1. To users seeing negative balances: this is an issue we are aware of. Do not panic, we know who you are and see the problem on our side. There is no need to contact us directly, we are working on a safe fix. If your balance still reflects a negative amount after the fix, you should reach out to us at that point.
2. The login CAPTCHA is being cached in some situations. If you are unable to log in, right click on the CAPTCHA and select “view image”. That is the true CAPTCHA you should be seeing. Type it in, and you will be able to access the marketplace.

Staff is working very hard behind the scenes on a few exciting updates you will see released this weekend. Expect a planned downtime announcement on Friday.

We are fighting for you very hard behind the scenes.

Thank you buyers, thank you vendors. Let’s get our community completely repaid.

Defcon

==End Quote==

Obviously no one can verify the accuracy of this data – also we could not confirm this with any of our “reliable” sources on the site, vendors or users while no one could tell us that they did had the money paid back to them, so its all based upon Defcons statement and quite a few forum posters on the Silk road’s forum, saying that they did get their money back, we would love to see some real proofs of this from such accounts with screenshots showing the pending balance and the paid balance, so far we have found these 2 screenshots posted today on Reddit on the Re-opened silk road sub that was shut down for a the last couple of weeks:

If this is real or not, this still does not change the fact that for the last couple of months Silk Road was the main source for the Darknet markets scene drama, so it is still advised to proceed with maximum caution before and if, doing any business on this site (considering the hack /scam /security problems and the lack of reliable escrow, support and some other technical problems), even if some of them are justified to some extent (the moderators arrests for example).

This way or another, we truly hope that everyone who lost money will have it paid back to them, and that the silk road admins will raise the standards bar of darknet honesty, by paying back everything that was lost – regardless of “how” it was lost.

We will keep following this for further developments and update once we see something interesting, a lot of people are asking us about the other dramas going on the silk road forums, but we tend to ignore 99% of them at the current state of this market and address only the “major” developments & harm reduction or security issues.

For now, Keep safe and keep us posted with stuff we have missed, thanks to everyone who keep us informed for everyone’s benefit!

2 comments

Well done defcon, long live silk road. Ignore the nay sayers. Proof is in the pudding and I’m sure you will deliver ahead of time with all monies paid back. Lots of whiney children moaning about this and that. What they forget is that defcon is risking his liberty for silk road.